Do You Hate Poor People?

If you hate poor people and want them to become even poorer, the best thing to do is pass minimum wage laws. There is an added benefit for proponents of minimum wage laws. Supporting these kinds of things publicly makes you look like a kind and caring person. For the sinister, this is a way of destroying people and looking good to others at the same time.

You can point to the benefits. Find some recipients of the new minimum wage. Put them in front of a camera to prove it was a good idea. Don’t worry about being knocked off. Costs of these kinds of things are completely invisible in the present moment. Be a virtue signaler. No one will suspect that you are rotten down to the core. Support minimum wage initiatives, look good to others and hurt the poor at the same time. What could be finer for a genuinely sinister person.

St. Louis just passed a new minimum wage law. Sit back and watch the misery grow.

The destructive nature of the minimum wage concept is not hard to understand. There is no chance of a net gain to the poor in general. Claiming to increase living standards with a minimum wage is like touting the invention of a suspended animation machine. Suspended animation is not possible given the limitations of the laws of physics. Increasing living standards by passing minimum wage laws is not possible given the laws of survival which are the basis of natural law.

Many fantasize that business owners will suddenly modify the profit motive that keeps them in business and share their profit with employees to a greater degree than the natural labor market dictates. In a million years this will never happen. An economic system must accommodate human nature.

What happens when a minimum wage is in effect is a huge glut of unemployable people emerge and  act as a permanent drag on the entire economy.  Wages really only increase on a net basis when everyone is employed at what the market will bear. Labor shortages occur and employers must bid up wages to find employees. Anything short of letting the free market work turns out to be a net loss to the poor who are ostensibly helped by laws that are passed. With minimum wage laws a few make more but fewer work at all. There is no way it can turn out any other way.

 

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About Fantasy Free Economics

James Quillian independent scholar,free market economist,and teacher of natural law. Who is James Quillian? Certainly I am nobody special, Just a tireless academic and deep thinker. Besides that, I have broken the code with respect to economics and political science. Credentials? Nothing you would be impressed with. I am not a household name. It is hard to become famous writing that virtually no one in the country is genuinely not in touch with reality. But, if I did not do that, there would be no point in my broking the broken the code. If you read the blog, it is easy to see that there are just a few charts, no math and no quantitative analysis. That is not by accident. Given what I know, those items are completely useless. I do turn out to be highly adept at applying natural law. Natural law has predominance over any principles the social science comes up. By virtue of understanding natural law, I can debunk, in just a few sentences , any theory that calls for intervention by a government. My taking the time to understand the ins and outs of Keynes General Theory is about like expecting a chemistry student to completely grasp all that the alchemists of the middle ages thought they understood in efforts to turn base metals into goal. Keynesian theory clearly calls for complete objectivity. Government can only make political decisions. Keynesian techniques call for economic decisions. So, why go any further with that? Fantasy Free Economics is in a sense a lot like technical analysis. Technical analysis began with the premise that it was impossible to gain enough information studying fundamentals to gain a trading advantage. Study the behavior of investors instead. Unlike technical analysis, I don't use technical charts. What I understand are the incentives of different people and entities active in the economics arena. For example, there is no such thing as an incentive to serve with life in the aggregate. In the aggregate, only self interest applies. It is routinely assumed otherwise. That is highly unappealing. But, I am sorry. That is the way it is. I can accept that because I am genuinely in touch with reality. Step one in using Fantasy Free Economics is for me to understand just how little I really know. A highly credentialed economist may know 100 times what I do based on the standard dogma. Compare the knowledge each of us has compared to all there is to know and we both look like we know nothing at all. There is always more than we don't know than what we do know. I am humble enough to present myself on that basis. Why? That is the way it is. I am not bad at math. I have taught math. What I understand is when to use it and when to rely on something else. Math is useless in natural law so I don't use it. While others look at numbers, I am busy understanding the forces in nature that makes their numbers what they are. That gives me a clear advantage.